The Golden Compass - What a disappointment
Dec. 8th, 2007 07:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stefbugSo we went to see the Golden Compass and, like the title says, it was not good. I'll say the one good thing about it here, which is that it was all very pretty, and put the rest under a cut so that I don't spoiler anyone.
1) The accents, especially Lyra's, were annoying beyond all belief. They were all forced, they were all obviously faked and for the most part they were frustratingly inconsistent.
Not only that but the dialog was nightmarishly clunky. It was stilted and just not well done. It made it very difficult to hear the characters speak without wanting to mock and ridicule them.
2)Lyra. She was a Mary-Sue among Mary-Sues. Anything she needed she got, without a moment of hesitation. There was no risk to her, there was no doubt that she wouldn't get what she was after or that she might not make it through. In fact, in spite of being in mortal danger more than once, she came through the whole thing without a scratch on her or any of her companions. She instantly knew what the villains were doing, after having found a couple of pieces of paper that just happened to be left laying around. She had a plan for everything, and they worked every time, without going wrong.
She had two emotional states - angry or insolently brave - and that's it. There was no distress when she saw no way out (possibly because there was never a time when there was no way out), there was no fear despite the fact that she was in life or death situations, there was nothing but those two emotions. Through the whole movie.
I guess it was all good though, because she was the child mentioned in a prophecy. So everybody fell over themselves to be nice to her, even if they had no reason. Not once did anyone treat her like the child that she was supposed to be. Oh no, can't have that, she's the child of prophecy. Anybody that didn't like her or treated her like the annoying whiny brat she was had to be a villain. In fact, you could tell a villain from a mile away by the way they treated her.
Going back to the whole whiny brat issue she was acting more like a 5 year old who hadn't gotten the toy they wanted for Christmas than a 13/14 year old. She moaned, she bitched, she angsted but not once did she accept that just maybe there was a reason for some of the things the adults did.
Despite the fact that she was supposed to be the main character and the one that you identified with, there was no connection there. There was no sympathy with the character at all.
3)The alethiometer. Such a deus ex machina. Lyra needed to know something it told her, every damn time, without fail. It meant that she never struggled because the compass immediately had the answer for her. The worst thing was that the knowledge needed to actually read it was supposed to have been forgotten entirely because the few scholars who knew how to use it were dead. She picks it up and suddenly she knows how to interpret it perfectly. Just like that. No learning curve, she just gets it after somebody monologues about what it does. Note that I said what, not how.
4)INFODUMP. There was no mystery to this film because they spelled everything out in minute detail. Not once did you have to stop and think about what had just happened because you could guarentee that withing about thirty seconds of it happening somebody would be explaining it. At length. In great detail. It's bad enough in books, because they aren't a visual medium and sometimes it's difficult to get the balance between show and tell. In films it's unforgivable. DO NOT TREAT YOUR AUDIENCE LIKE MORONS!
5)Repetition, repetition, repetition. They told us about twenty times that it was an alethiometer, also known as a golden compass. No really, they did. They achingly repeated everything every other scene, just in case we hadn't gotten it the first five or six times or had somehow forgotten it within the space of a few minutes. There is only so many times you can be told something before you want to start screaming "WE GET IT" at the screen.
6)For a film that was sooooooooo slow nothing happened. There was no development. There was no action, and what action there was supposed to be was either over in about thirty seconds or filmed so badly that you couldn't tell what was happening. Things were mentioned once, like who Lyra's parents were, and then mysteriously forgotten.
7)Thing like this annoyed me: Lord Azrael stops atop a snow drift and remarks to his daemon that they should be careful as he's sure the villains would have hired bandits to stop him. Less than ten seconds later he get shot at by, you guessed it, bandits. Or, Lyra needs help in the ice. She just happens to meet someone who mentions hiring an armored bear might be a good idea, oh and one happens to be here. She goes there and the bear couldn't give a stuff. She waves her magic compass and suddenly the bear owes her a life debt. They telegraphed everything for about half an hour before it happened. That is not foreshadowing, that's fucking sloppy. You know it's bad when you can guess what's going to happen not only just before it does, but for about twenty minutes before it does.
8)The pacing was horrible. Not only was it so slow, like I mentioned above, but it jumped around something wicked. I doubt any scene lasted more that 5 minutes at the most, and that is not enough to be able to develop any sort of story.
I wish I could have both the money and the couple of hours of my life back that it took to see this.
I would strongly advise that you don't go to see this. I'm normally pretty laid back about films, since they're just supposed to be a bit of fun, but this one bored me silly.
1) The accents, especially Lyra's, were annoying beyond all belief. They were all forced, they were all obviously faked and for the most part they were frustratingly inconsistent.
Not only that but the dialog was nightmarishly clunky. It was stilted and just not well done. It made it very difficult to hear the characters speak without wanting to mock and ridicule them.
2)Lyra. She was a Mary-Sue among Mary-Sues. Anything she needed she got, without a moment of hesitation. There was no risk to her, there was no doubt that she wouldn't get what she was after or that she might not make it through. In fact, in spite of being in mortal danger more than once, she came through the whole thing without a scratch on her or any of her companions. She instantly knew what the villains were doing, after having found a couple of pieces of paper that just happened to be left laying around. She had a plan for everything, and they worked every time, without going wrong.
She had two emotional states - angry or insolently brave - and that's it. There was no distress when she saw no way out (possibly because there was never a time when there was no way out), there was no fear despite the fact that she was in life or death situations, there was nothing but those two emotions. Through the whole movie.
I guess it was all good though, because she was the child mentioned in a prophecy. So everybody fell over themselves to be nice to her, even if they had no reason. Not once did anyone treat her like the child that she was supposed to be. Oh no, can't have that, she's the child of prophecy. Anybody that didn't like her or treated her like the annoying whiny brat she was had to be a villain. In fact, you could tell a villain from a mile away by the way they treated her.
Going back to the whole whiny brat issue she was acting more like a 5 year old who hadn't gotten the toy they wanted for Christmas than a 13/14 year old. She moaned, she bitched, she angsted but not once did she accept that just maybe there was a reason for some of the things the adults did.
Despite the fact that she was supposed to be the main character and the one that you identified with, there was no connection there. There was no sympathy with the character at all.
3)The alethiometer. Such a deus ex machina. Lyra needed to know something it told her, every damn time, without fail. It meant that she never struggled because the compass immediately had the answer for her. The worst thing was that the knowledge needed to actually read it was supposed to have been forgotten entirely because the few scholars who knew how to use it were dead. She picks it up and suddenly she knows how to interpret it perfectly. Just like that. No learning curve, she just gets it after somebody monologues about what it does. Note that I said what, not how.
4)INFODUMP. There was no mystery to this film because they spelled everything out in minute detail. Not once did you have to stop and think about what had just happened because you could guarentee that withing about thirty seconds of it happening somebody would be explaining it. At length. In great detail. It's bad enough in books, because they aren't a visual medium and sometimes it's difficult to get the balance between show and tell. In films it's unforgivable. DO NOT TREAT YOUR AUDIENCE LIKE MORONS!
5)Repetition, repetition, repetition. They told us about twenty times that it was an alethiometer, also known as a golden compass. No really, they did. They achingly repeated everything every other scene, just in case we hadn't gotten it the first five or six times or had somehow forgotten it within the space of a few minutes. There is only so many times you can be told something before you want to start screaming "WE GET IT" at the screen.
6)For a film that was sooooooooo slow nothing happened. There was no development. There was no action, and what action there was supposed to be was either over in about thirty seconds or filmed so badly that you couldn't tell what was happening. Things were mentioned once, like who Lyra's parents were, and then mysteriously forgotten.
7)Thing like this annoyed me: Lord Azrael stops atop a snow drift and remarks to his daemon that they should be careful as he's sure the villains would have hired bandits to stop him. Less than ten seconds later he get shot at by, you guessed it, bandits. Or, Lyra needs help in the ice. She just happens to meet someone who mentions hiring an armored bear might be a good idea, oh and one happens to be here. She goes there and the bear couldn't give a stuff. She waves her magic compass and suddenly the bear owes her a life debt. They telegraphed everything for about half an hour before it happened. That is not foreshadowing, that's fucking sloppy. You know it's bad when you can guess what's going to happen not only just before it does, but for about twenty minutes before it does.
8)The pacing was horrible. Not only was it so slow, like I mentioned above, but it jumped around something wicked. I doubt any scene lasted more that 5 minutes at the most, and that is not enough to be able to develop any sort of story.
I wish I could have both the money and the couple of hours of my life back that it took to see this.
I would strongly advise that you don't go to see this. I'm normally pretty laid back about films, since they're just supposed to be a bit of fun, but this one bored me silly.
